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Review: Fiction: Aloft by Chang-Rae Lee

Jerry Battle, the soon-to-be-60 narrator of Chang-Rae Lee’s beautifully written third novel, likes to fly solo. Whenever the weather permits, the semi-retired Long Island businessman leaves behind the complications of his life to soar over the suburbs, hoping to rise above “the pedestrian, sea-level flotsam that surely blemishes our good scene”. He is a man gripped by a lifelong case of wanderlust who relishes “the continued promise of lift, this hope that I could in my own way challenge gravity’s pull”.

Of course, the laws of physics dictate that Jerry must eventually come back to messy earth. His love life is a shambles — his Puerto Rican girlfriend, Rita, has recently left him for a rich lawyer, while Kelly, the southern woman he has been seeing on the side, is in hospital after overdosing on OxyContin. His son Jack, meanwhile, is busy bankrupting the